The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics Revised and Expanded Edition

About this book

In this unflinching look at white supremacy George Lipsitz argues that racism is a matter of interests as well as attitudes a problem of property as well as pigment. Above and beyond personal prejudice whiteness is a structured advantage that produces unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation employment housing and health care for minorities. Reaching beyond the black/white binary Lipsitz shows how whiteness works in respect to Asian Americans Latinos and Native Americans.Lipsitz delineates the weaknesses embedded in civil rights laws the racial dimensions of economic restructuring and deindustrialization and the effects of environmental racism job discrimination and school segregation. He also analyzes the centrality of whiteness to U.S. culture and perhaps most importantly he identifies the sustained and perceptive critique of white privilege embedded in the radical black tradition. This revised and expanded edition also includes an essay about the impact of Hurricane Katrina on working class Blacks in New Orleans whose perpetual struggle for dignity and self determination has been obscured by the citys image as a tourist party town.